Arland, Marcel

Born July 5, 1899, in Varennes, Haute-Marne Department. French writer; member of the Académie Française since 1968.

After Arland became disappointed with dadaism and surrealism (the essay “New Malady of Our Age,” 1924), he asserted the pantheistic unity of man and nature (the novellas Foreign Lands, 1923, and The Obscure Way, 1924). Arland was disgusted by the vices of the bourgeois city and called for a return to the land (the novel The Order, 1929; Goncourt Prize) and the restraining of rebellious reason by religious dogma (Notes of Gilbert, 1931, 1944, 1966). Realism triumphs in his work when he looks at the world through the eyes of a simple workingman (collection of short stories The Living, 1934), who is fascinated by life and stoically accepts adversity and death (the novella Native Land, 1938). Arland describes the collapse of the patriarchal world in the cycles of short stories The Happiest Time (1937) and Water and Flame (1956). Arland’s hero is a man for whom love and life are incompatible with banality and evil (Without Pausing for Breath, 1960, and The Great Pardon, 1965). Arland is the editor in chief of the literary journal La Nouvelle Revue française.